Twitter Introduces Tweet Button

Twitter has launched a “Tweet Button” for websites that want to make it easy for visitors to post links on the popular microblogging service.

To use the feature, site managers only have to add a few lines of code to the page they want the button to appear. Clicking on the button will launch a pop-up box with the shortened web link directing others to the story, photo or any other content on the page.Twitter introduced the feature Thursday, hoping to boost link sharing on the site by making the process easier. “Copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs just to share a line in a Tweet is too much work,” the company said on the Twitter Blog, referring to how people often post links today.

Sharing links is a popular activity on Twitter. Close to a quarter of the millions of tweets sent each day on the site. In May, Twitter reached 2 billion tweets, a milestone that marked a doubling of the number of short messages posted on the site in five months.Twitter developed the Tweet Button with TweetMeme, a company that has offered a similar “retweet button” to web publishers since 2009. Starting Thursday, TweetMeme switched to using the new Tweet Button.

Many news sites have already embedded the latest Twitter feature. Those sites include CNN.com, CBS Interactive, HuffingtonPost.com, Time.com and USA Today. Google’s video-sharing site YouTube is also using the Tweet Button.Twitter this week also introduced an enhancement to the site that made it possible for users to receive tweets on their mobile devices, even if they don’t have a Twitter account. A person still needs an account to send a tweet.Twitter is calling the capability Fast Follow and says it is working to make it available in other countries.